Marjorie Morningstar

  Marjorie said, “You’re a cruel hound, do you know? A cruel hound.”

  “Well, I don’t want to offend you, Margie, truly I don’t, but we’re coming to the heart of the matter. The poor slobs in restaurants and theatres who used to goggle at me when I’d walk in with one of those girls were suffering for nothing, if they’d only known. They were thinking, ‘Wowie! There goes the lucky guy, the guy with the answer.’ But there’s nothing special about a pretty girl, and that’s God’s truth. Once you’re in bed with a girl, it hardly matters a damn what she looks like. Because you’re too close to her, don’t you see? She’s just a pink warm expanse and a blurry face. The rest is all imagination. No matter who a man’s bedmate is—his old boring wife, or the glamorous new model he’s inveigled or bought—when he gets right down to it sex is just the same old clumsy business, Marjorie, that the birds and the bees and the dogs do. If he’s in love, or thinks he’s in love, then it’s charming. If he’s not in love, if he’s just doing it to be doing it—Margie, I swear to you, with the prettiest living girl it’s nothing. A man makes it something only by telling himself over and over, ‘Look at me, look at me, I’ve got myself a model, a show girl,’ whipping up his imagination to remind himself that he’s achieved the world’s desire. Because it’s so ordinary in fact, so paltry, so trivial. If he has a shred of affection for his sagging old wife, or the homely girl next door he grew up with, he’s better off in bed with her than with all the M-G-M starlets, one after another. That is the fact of the matter. Few people have a chance to find it out. And those who do, like me, usually shut up about it. Because they don’t want to knock down their own achievements in their minds, they can’t afford to. Happily, my self-esteem doesn’t happen to rest on my box score with girls.

  “Now you’ll say that certain men spend their lifetime wallowing with one pretty girl after another—rich lechers, gangsters, Hollywood wolves. ‘How come,’ you’ll say, ‘these men never find out they’re living a lie, chasing an empty delusion, if it’s so obvious?’

  “And now we’re getting really warm. For them, it’s no lie, no delusion at all. For them, you see, a model isn’t a model, a show girl isn’t a show girl. Sex is the least of their preoccupations, though they do nothing but talk and think about it. For a certain low-grade or immature or sick mind, a pretty girl is a Hit.”

  “Noel, I hate to interrupt you, but your steak’s getting cold. Take a few bites.”

  She was scared by the flash of anger across his face. He struck the table with his fist. “I’ll eat when I’m bloody good and ready. What’s the matter, is this too hard for you? I don’t think I’ve used a single three-syllable word. Hell, I’d be better off telling all this to a turtle.” He splashed Guinness into the empty glass and drank thirstily.

  Marjorie now decided that there was something seriously wrong with Noel. She had frightening forebodings that he might be on the verge of a mental collapse. He looked sick. He fell on the steak and began devouring it with unhealthy voracity. She said, “Dear, I’m fascinated, but you said you were starving, and you look starved, that’s all—”

  He ate in silence for a while, washing down the meat with Guinness. “Okay, don’t apologize. I shouldn’t have flared. I’m tense and tired, just don’t interrupt me again. And don’t go blank on me. This takes some telling and some listening.

  “All this evolved, obviously, from a process of self-searching. I was asking myself, All right, let’s get down to it, just once in this life. What do you honestly and truly want? Do you want to marry Marjorie Morgenstern, for instance? You’re in love with her—” (Marjorie’s breath caught, and she listened to what followed with a throbbing ache in her breast.) “She may not be the most beautiful girl in the world, but she is in your silly eyes, and that’s all that counts…. Well, after some hard thinking the answer was no, I don’t want to marry Marjorie Morgenstern—certainly not with my whole heart. Okay, next question, do you want to sleep with her? Answer, yes and no—the chains and the mess would be the same as if I married her. Maybe more so.”

  “Well, thanks for that, anyway.” Marjorie’s gay tone broke to hoarseness in the middle of the sentence.

  Noel went on, “Is there some other woman you really want, then? Miss America? Hedy Lamarr, maybe? No, we’ve been through all that. Professional beauties are dull people, and actresses are hard-boiled guys inside lovely bodies. Well, then, down comes bastion three, sex.—You understand, we’ve already levelled religion and philosophy.”

  “I understand, dear.”

  “Good. We proceed to the last bastion. Money. Cash. L’argent, the great French secret of secrets, which God knows the French actually do revere like religious fanatics, as though it were the last inner mystery of a creed. Now, I asked myself, is that the ultimate answer, really? Is Balzac the last word? And after a few minutes I burst out laughing to realize how completely I myself refuted that idea. Margie, you know that the path to money, all the money I can ever use, is open to me in Sam Rothmore’s office. Sam, sad old bastard, wants a son. I can have the job by simply showing up on time and answering the mail. In time I can be a millionaire like him, own paintings and black Cadillacs. But I hate the whole prospect so, I’ve been fighting it by being a sloven and a washout. I didn’t start working in his office because I wanted money, but because I thought maybe you wanted it. And not even because you want it so much. But because your mother estimates men by their earning power, and I was just piqued enough by this whole thing to want to show her I could beat old steady Dr. Shapiro at raking in the shekels, as well as in all the more important ways—”

  “I thought we were going to forget Dr. Shapiro—”

  “And the real motive under it all probably was that I suspected, as I still suspect, that you have the same ideas as your mother deep down. And that they’ll emerge like rocks at low tide, when the dream of being Marjorie Morningstar ebbs.”

  “You’re drawing a lovely picture of me, I must say.”

  “Please don’t be idiotic enough to take this personally, Margie, will you? I’m following the thread of an idea.”

  “Oh, I see. Following the thread of an idea.”

  “Yes. Shut up, please. I thought of all the clichés. ‘It’s not money, but what you can buy with it. Money is power. Money is security. Money is freedom.’ And so forth. Well, then, whatever the last bastion is, evidently it’s not money, is it? It’s freedom, or power, or security, or whatever money really represents. We haven’t come to the prime mover, the uncaused cause, of human nature. As for the French and all their ironic wisdom about sex and cash—well, they’re not only erotic lunatics, as Tolstoy said long ago, they’re pecuniary lunatics, that’s the long and short of it, and so to hell with Balzac. I don’t particularly want money—or, rather yes, sure, I want it, the way I want a dinner tonight, so that I can go on being Noel Airman, comfortably and pleasantly, But what does Noel Airman really want? In common with everybody else? That is the question.

  “When the answer suddenly broke over me, Margie, I got up and danced. I swear I danced around on the steps of the Forty-second Street Library, where I’d gotten to with all my walking, hours and hours. I’d been sitting there on a stone bench by the lions, all alone in a black mist—you could barely see the street lamps, just little yellow blurs, it was so foggy—it must have been four in the morning. Well, I got up, and danced and capered between those two lions, Marjorie, like the devil on Bald Mountain.

  “You see, by great good luck I’d had the crucial clue that same afternoon.

  “Imogene brought me down to earth, you know, out of that religious seizure I was having, and I remembered that my publishers had had Old Moon Face for a couple of weeks, and I hadn’t heard anything. I phoned them. They said they’d been trying to get in touch with me for days. Well, baby, the song’s a dead-sure hit. Crosby is going to record it. Benny Goodman, too. It’ll be played everywhere. My publisher says it’s bigger than Raining Kisses—”

  “Noel! How marvel
ous!”

  He squeezed briefly the hand she put on his. “I can’t make less than ten thousand. Margie, it isn’t the money, I swear. I know that by being a good boy I can make more in the Paramount hierarchy than I ever will writing songs and shows. But—and this is where the French are so cockeyed—five thousand earned by a hit song makes me feel richer than fifty thousand earned at a Paramount desk. At the thought of having a hit again after four years, I tell you I’m filled with a happiness that’s sweet and pure and total. That’s the inspiration that came to me, Marjorie. What makes Noel Airman purely and wholly happy? Answer: a Hit. Nothing else. A Hit is beauty bare. And if you ask me what I really want out of life after this, I have to tell you I want nothing, really, but another Hit. And after that, another Hit. And for the rest of my life, Hits. I’m being honest. This is the filthy bottom truth that people will never say about themselves, and half of them won’t even believe. But that’s the fire that will never burn out, Margie, it’s the worm that never dies.

  “Don’t you see that that’s all money means to the old mumbling billionaires? Why do they keep working and scheming? Why do they lie awake nights figuring out new mergers? They can’t measure their own security and power, it’s so colossal. They could roll in golden excess for fifty years—champagne baths, diamond dog collars, harems of blondes, they could paper their walls with Rembrandts—it wouldn’t begin to dent their pile. Yet they go on making more, and more, and more. Why? Because every time the total of their net worth jumps up, it’s a Hit. And THAT is the prime mover, the uncaused cause, the center of human nature and conduct, Margie.

  “I tell you, with this piece once in your hand, the whole puzzle of life falls apart. It’s like calculus, or the theory of evolution, this one idea—it absolutely opens up the secrets of the universe. Not the physical, the social universe. Freud’s sex drive is foolishness compared to it. This thing only grows stronger and stronger and stronger with the years. It’s strongest in old age. Look at a politician, eighty years old, making a speech to a crowd in the rain. What’s driving him? Not ambition. He’s been a senator for forty years. He can never be anything more. But by winning this election he can have one more Hit. He’d rather die of pneumonia than risk missing the Hit. Take a minister with a white head, preaching humility and selflessness and meekness—why is he rolling his voice so beautifully? Why is the sermon typed up in extra-large type, so he won’t have to squint, while he preaches forgetfulness of self? He wants his sermon to be a Hit. Don’t you suppose the selfless mother, scrimping and starving to send her pretty daughter through college, regards this girl as the great Hit of her life? Don’t you suppose a communist is making himself part of the great Hit of history? Take a dried-up old skeptic like Santayana. If life’s really meaningless and valueless, just a pretty dream, why bother to write about it? Why say life is meaningless in twenty volumes full of exquisite meaning? Obviously because every volume means another Hit for old Santayana—no other reason is possible. Turn wherever you will on the human scene, this thing governs. It’s as universal as gravitation, it’s as all-pervading as Spinoza’s God….” He fell silent, staring wildly at her, and she felt terribly nervous. “Well? I could go on and on, but why should I? That’s it. Rough, hurried, told all wrong. Does it mean anything to you? Does it convey one thousandth of the light to you that it does to me?”

  “Noel, it’s absolutely brilliant—”

  His face shone. “It really does get over to you. It really does? It does sound like something?”

  “Oh yes, yes indeed.”

  “Thank God.” He looked at the knife and fork clutched forgotten in his hands, grease hardening on them in little bubbles. He cut into the steak, then threw down the knife and fork and pushed the plate away. “What on earth is this great bloody hunk of a dead cow doing under my nose? It’s the most repulsive thing I’ve ever seen.” He pounded on the table with his fist and yelled, “Mrs. Kleinschmidt! Take this away! Bring me a drink.”

  Marjorie said, “Noel, eat something, please do, you need it.”

  “Marge, if I eat another bite of that purple horror, I’ll go mad. I’d as soon eat a boiled child. How can people eat meat, anyway? I swear, I’m going to turn vegetarian.”

  The woman started to mutter when she saw the uneaten steak, but after one glance at Noel’s face she subsided, carried it off, and brought him a double drink of rye. He drank half of it. “Tell me more about how good my idea is, Marge. You can’t imagine how I need to hear it. I feel like Galileo the first time he saw Jupiter’s moons. The man must have run around like a scared rat, to find someone else to look through his telescope and tell him he wasn’t crazy.”

  “Noel, what you’re saying isn’t crazy in the least. It’s absolutely true. You’re proving that what really drives people is nothing but egotism. Everybody knows that’s so, actually. And the way you put it, it’s even—”

  Some of the gladness went out of Noel’s expression. “Egotism? Who said anything about egotism? I never mentioned the word egotism, not once.”

  “Well no, but this hunger for hits, what is it but just plain egotism? You’re completely right, Noel. The more I study people, the more I realize—” She broke off. He was covering his face with his hands, groaning. “Now what’s wrong, for heaven’s sake, darling?”

  He took his hands away and looked at her for a long time, his face dead gray. “Margie—Margie, my dear good girl—to say that people are driven by egotism is probably the dullest and most obvious banality that the human mind can ever achieve. Don’t tell me that what I’ve been working on for four hysterical days and telling you for twenty solid minutes amounts to no more than that. Don’t…”

  “Noel, I don’t think it’s a banal idea at all. It’s a very shrewd observation.”

  His staring sunken black-shadowed eyes were making her more and more uneasy.

  He said, “I daresay I skimmed over it, left out all the fine points, ruined it in the telling, but still—Margie, you should have gotten more out of it than that. This idea has absolutely nothing to do with egotism, nothing at all, I swear. Why, the difference between the passion for Hits and egotism—egotism is solipsist, don’t you see, Hits are externalized, that’s the whole point—maybe I should have made that a hell of a lot clearer—I’m sure I have in my writing—” His voice was fading. He seemed to be talking to himself. “But you’re right, by God, the thing actually does skirt the most ghastly and empty banality, doesn’t it? If I don’t make that one difference crystal-clear the whole thing is nothing but the vapidest college-boy philosophizing and—how fundamental is that difference? Isn’t it just a question of projection, isn’t the externalizing just a secondary mechanism?—No, no.” He glared and hit the table with both fists. “It’s my punishment for being so damn eager, that’s all, for talking technical philosophy to a girl. Margie, it’s not your fault. I don’t mean to scare you. Maybe you’ve let all the air out with your hatpin, but I don’t think so. I’ll still get this thing down on paper and show it to somebody who knows—”

  “Noel, I didn’t mean to discourage you. On the contrary, I really think you’ve hit on something extraordinary, I really do, dear—”

  He smiled at her and drank off the rye. He coughed a little and slumped back on the bench. “Whew.”

  “I think you should go home and get some sleep, a whole lot of sleep, Noel, before you do any more work. It’ll come out better, you know it will, in the end. You’re just burning up your last resources of nervous energy, and living on alcohol, and that’s no way to write anything really good.”

  “I have been in quite a state,” he said, and his voice was low, weary, and relaxed. “That must be fairly obvious. I couldn’t have slept these past few days if I’d wanted to—Marjorie, have you ever thought of a joke in your dreams that seemed the funniest and smartest joke in the world? And then awakened and realized that it was absolutely silly, made no sense at all?”

  “Lots of times, but—”

  “It’
s barely possible that this whole idea, this rigmarole about Hits, is just another manic fantasy, after all, a mishmash of Adler, Nietzsche, La Rochefoucauld, and who knows what else—just another lulling hallucination to keep my nerves from going PAING! like a thousand breaking piano wires—”

  “It isn’t, Noel, don’t believe that—”

  “I won’t, don’t worry, not yet. But if it turns out that way—well, hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if the earth goes on turning. On the whole, I’m glad I got to tell it to you, before I left. The feminine reaction always has its cold-water validity, tempering if nothing else—”

  “Before you left? Where are you going?”

  He sat up and took her hand, looking at her with a sad smile. She said after a terrible moment or two, “Noel, what is it? Where are you going?”

  “Marjorie Morgenstern, love of my life, we’re through. Isn’t that obvious to you? We’re not going to see each other after today. We wouldn’t have seen each other today if you hadn’t come barging down to my apartment, and if Imogene hadn’t thought you were a grocery boy. I’m going to Mexico, probably Sunday morning, driving down with a sculptor friend of mine, Phil Yates. Just as soon as I finish a draft of what I’m writing, and get an advance from my publisher to buy us a jalopy. Bye-bye Rothmore, bye-bye Marjorie, bye-bye the whole bourgeois dream. It was great fun, as the fellow says, but it was just one of those things.” His glance was kind, melancholy. “Are you desolate?”